


Conographia

by kittu9



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: F/M, Freeform, Royai 100, What-If, Women Being Awesome, love is really complicated, love not romance, mostly canon-compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-07-18
Updated: 2011-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-21 12:51:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 4,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/225362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/kittu9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was evidence about them of things unseen.</p><p>Vignettes from the Royai 100 Challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. From Yesterday

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written from November 2004 – June 2006, Conographia was my original fumbling with the whole Roy/Riza relationship. When I left LJ in 2006, I removed links for all of the LJ copy (including 28 vignettes that were not posted anywhere else); I am now re-posting them, with a fair amount of editing—though there are a few that are never going to mesh with canon. Additionally, there are about six pieces that were lost to the sands of time and vagrancies of technology; I will note when a vignette has been rewritten.

The music begins hesitantly; warbling, adolescent strains fill the room. It sounds as awkward as the young cadet feels until the moment when the players finally grasp the correct note, and then reach the first glorious crescendo, when everything falls, suddenly and with absolute precision, into place. The ball has officially begun.

For a brief instant the lovely, understated silhouettes and perfect profiles of girls with the slender necks of swans rising above their shoulders captivate him. However, his speech never falters in its even cadence and nothing betrays his rapturous amazement at the sight of a roomful of cadets in hopeful blue, and the young women accompanying them. The girls are bedecked in fine, glimmering fabrics and precious gems. They are all of them pieces of a fabulously adorned, brightly colored puzzle.

It is his first military dress function. He is so bedazzled and so determined not to show it that he turns and moves to dance first with the most plainly attired woman there—a female cadet his own age or perhaps a little younger. Like him, she is also in dress uniform, brilliantly blue and starched—although perhaps with crisper creases. She is obviously better with an iron than he. 

She has a quite, precise air about her that makes her both a suitable dance partner and the prettiest girl in the room.

They dance wonderfully together. When the music stops, before he is composed enough to step back, bow, and take his leave to move about the room, they hear the gracious applause of the collected assembly. In this case, the assembly consists of the officers and their wives (some of them inappropriately young), the cadets, the women from about town. Also the spinster chaperones that sit primly to the side, smiling at the couples on the floor that are able to execute the neat, slightly scandalous patterns of a waltz.

The cadets bow to each other and part ways; he moves to socialize and she stands at the sidelines. She is respectfully attentive to the war stories of a superior officer, and even dances with him; a spirited polka that has her clinging to his hands for dear life. 

She dances also with another boy near her own age; he is blond, strong-featured, and strangely awkward. Compared to her, his steps are heavy and hesitating. Unlike her first partner, his palms are sweaty. She is polite, but refuses a second dance.

The rest of the evening passes, for her, without incident. Her dark-haired partner from that first dance flirts diplomatically with the girls about him, but he leaves quietly as well. The two of them walk out together, unobtrusively, and go their separate ways at the door. The ball is over, all of it to be packaged away in large boxes with crisp paper and those fine dresses the young girls wore. The memory of the evening will be pulled out like an heirloom by a group of those dwindled, frail chaperones; they will remember each detail vividly and hungrily, coloring the events with phrases they think are romantic. 

Years later they will reminisce about  _this_  party,  _this_  dance, remembering the silks in a brighter hue, the lace-edged handkerchiefs and the blue dress uniforms more neatly starched. They will talk about that dance like it’s some sort of myth, a beautiful story to tell the girls that visit them in their tiny, old homes.

 _Do you remember those dancing soldiers?_ One of them will ask, leaning her body so far forward that she is in danger of falling out of her chair.  _The dark-haired boy and that fair girl, the one with the pretty eyes._

The old gossips will recall the sweet, clear movements, the splendid turns about the floor.

 _It was amazing,_ another will remark.  _They were really the most beautiful things I will ever imagine._ (She wonders to herself if it was a dream, but dismisses the idea; it is not a possibility she wishes to consider.)

Immortalized in careful, measured time, those two impossible people dance on without fumbling, into the dark of some unsolicited memory. There is a smooth, repetitious movement to it, causing the dance to loop back around itself again and again, caught up in the fragile blindness characteristic of those beloved on this earth.

 _(But it really wasn't like that;_ one of the old women tries to explain on her deathbed.  _It was even more wonderful than I can remember, more wonderful than that distortion time allows.)_

 _(Oh,_ she whispers, falling asleep, _if only you could have seen that dance, like they were the only people left in one small world, in that small place that time provides…)_

Somewhere in the world, Roy and Riza are still young, and dancing.


	2. Side of the Face

If you study the Colonel's face closely, you can detect the faint bristling of dark hair on his cheeks and the sharp, too-thin curve of his jaw; he has forgotten to shave.  
  
Between his eyes are small furrows, a weary, pinched look. He is tired, uneasy, overburdened.  
  
First Lieutenant Hawkeye is little better; though she is unaware of it, her face also betrays her exhaustion. The set of her chin, her clenched jaw, the creases across her nose and cheeks from sleeping face down, her head buried in the crook of her arm—she sleeps on her eyes because she does not trust them to stay shut. She is not certain of what she might, in dreams, catch a glimpse of.  
  
Together, the sides of their faces are the only visible equation; the two of them are sitting together, exhausted, heads bent closely together over yet another urgent file. There is little consideration, if any, for personal space between them—and indeed, now, it would make no sense at all.  
  
Seeing the Colonel and the First Lieutenant tired and tense like that, you can imagine that they are watching over a child's first real illness—their own child, maybe. You are tired enough that the idea of the two of them together is a plausible argument. (You’d expect it from the Colonel. Hawkeye is too beyond reproach to really consider it, and you’re almost sure she’d reprimand you for thinking it, if she were paying you any attention.)  
  
Your own eyes are tired. Sitting here, watching them from across the room, their profiles blur together and you can almost imagine their probable, dream child's face. You think: dark hair, serious eyes, and tiny lines that will haunt the lips of their daughters and the eyes of their sons, someday, maybe, yes, if they live through all of this to one day become old.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hate this one. I wrote it before I had any feel for or attachment to the rest of the subordinates, and I can’t see this coming from any of them. Unless Falman were on drugs, maybe. IDEK.


	3. Fingertips

These are the crisp conduits of nature: knuckle, finger, nail, and the knobby recession back to the wrist.  
  
Her nails are well groomed and short; his are the same, with barely perceptible calluses on the first three: middle, index, and thumb. Her fingers are perhaps stronger than his are—but when they hold hands in secret, they do it with all the tender harshness of poets, of realists.  
  
They let lives fall through their finger and land in their laps, knowing far too well that what they are hoping for is unlikely to come to pass.  
  
They hold each other's hands tightly; as if trying to leave love notes in the tiny half-moon indentations their nails leave behind in each other's skin. They don’t hold each other’s hands at all, but the desire still rings true, bright and stuttering—oh, they are lovers, they are ghosts, there is nothing yet to hold onto.


	4. Kiss

At first, like butterflies, the gentle fluttering of eyelashes against the face; soft heartbeats, small and afraid, stuttering like stuck moths in lamplight.

Then, in all quietness, like tired, forgiving animals, they bump faces and become still, nose to nose, eyelash the blinking eyelash, breath and breath.

They stare at each other in that abnormal, gasping stillness, unbelieving and skeptical of this moment's true meaning, if there is any. They wait, uncomfortably, for an interruption.


	5. Weapon (Heiki) & Fine (Heiki)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After manga chapter 37.

Hawkeye didn't often raise her voice, so when she began to yell at him, angrily gesturing with an empty pistol, he felt out of place and oddly guilty. He felt skittish, too, seeing the empty gun in her grasp—Hawkeye rarely was this unprofessional, and the gesture as well as the lack of ammunition was alarming.   
  
He rationalized that he did not feel as guilty now as he would have been if Hawkeye had been killed. So he only agreed with her, sounding rather flustered: yes, he was an idiot, yes, of course she was fine, of course she could take care of herself.  
  
He was glad to turn away from her as they walked down the fire escape to the car—it was easier to tell her that he was glad that she was all right without looking her in the eye. (It was easier to say a lot of things to her when he wasn’t looking her in the eye, as if this way he could address them to the woman she’d once been, or the woman she had since become.)  
  
Already there were bruises forming around her neck like some cruel brand, he could see the shadows of that monster’s hands even from beneath her high collar. Her voice rasped when she spoke, so different from the lilt she’d adopted over the ‘phone; it was one more thing on his conscience.


	6. The You Reflected in the Glass

Underneath her uniform, she’s a lot smaller than anyone ever guesses. Of course, she doesn’t consider herself as such—Riza has subtle, sustained curves, enough width the never call herself small—but her waist, her thin wrists and ankles, the long lines of her arms and legs give her an almost delicate, tidy appearance.   
  
Looking at Riza from that angle, she seems touchable and within reach.  
  
Roy remembers how, once, at a pointless picnic on an obscenely hot day she wore some sort of summery blouse and skirt set. All through the party he watched her out of the corner of one eye, the judicious movements of her shoulders and the repositioning of her fingers on her glass.   
  
When the party was over and everyone was leaving, all of them tired and a little drunk. Pausing in her task of gathering up abandoned glasses of half-consumed liquor, Riza yawned and stretched, raising her arms over her head and arching her spine along with the motion. The hem of her shirt rose with her arms and Roy had caught a glimpse of her hip, the sharp edginess of her bones straining against the skin like a knife pressed to elastic.  
  
The sight of her had broken his heart wide open.  
  
—Despite her apparent shapelessness in uniform—he can’t tell if the military is attempting to make a man out of her—, when Riza dresses down she is unlined. Her breasts and hips are deeply curved, soft beneath her shirt and skirt, her shoulders and the bones encircling her throat are like long fingers, sharp and protruding. Riza is no swan, but she might as well dress in white, as tragically mute and lovely as she is.  
  
Roy writes all of this in his little black book in another language, sketching arrays about the scattered text, thinking of ways to try and make her happy.  
  
He never comes up with much, but the fact that he is trying eases a little of the heartbreak that watching her entails; she wavers subtly, like an image on a hot horizon.  
  
It's like she's slipping away from him, ounce by ounce, fat dissolving into compact, unyielding muscle; her soft past painted over with the hard armor of the war, of Roy’s covert operations. It’s been a few years and some of her losses have crept from her face—she no longer looks so much like a murderer, but she never looks like she’s happy, or that Ishval has quite left her.   
  
She has become all hard lines, regimented, an equation, part of his small, constricted world. She should not be here, and yet she flourishes in a way that is beautiful and deathless. This makes him, inexplicably, unhappy.  
  
She should be incalculable, he thinks. Some sort of impossible variable in an equation that does not require a solution to prove its existence.


	7. Existence

Although everything about their lives is real, Riza occasionally wonders about what might have been, in a different world.

 

For instance: there is the dream of the two of them lying together on her bed in her sunny apartment. They are young and in love, carelessly so, with no one to answer to and nowhere they have to be. All that they must obey is their own desire, the gradual awakening from the warm tangle of arms and legs and blankets. They are lazy and still, enjoying that bright, unfiltered light streaming in from the open window. There is a dog lolling messily atop someone's discarded blazer on the floor.

At last Riza rises, pulls on a shapeless robe and pads barefoot into the kitchen to make coffee and toast, to sort through the mail, to straighten up the kitchen and the bedroom. She sets aside the personal letters—one from her mother, one from Maes and his wife, another from an old schoolmate—washes out two mugs and brings a tray of breakfast back to bed. In her absence, Roy has curled himself inextricably into the covers. She can see his smirk and knows that he is awake, teasing. She is not her father’s daughter; what they have is utterly their own.

But that is not the truth; it is only a wish, one that she does not care to dwell on. She lives in a world outside of her desires, or so Riza likes to think.

Somewhere today, Riza is home alone in her shabby, clean apartment, her dog lying across her feet. She is in bed, fully dressed, and she is ill with a virus that leaves her a weak, quivering mass of unusable muscles. She is daydreaming of the impossible, trying to ignore the ache in her bones, the unwelcome, heavy hum in her skull. Her life is on hold; the only continuing noises in her frozen word are those of her heartbeat, her pistol's recoil, the _skritch-scratch_ of a pen on paper, drowning out what can never be fully realized as more than a dream.


	8. Words that fade away in the chaos

Roy has always loved words and he shows it, trickling them into his speech like honey, like opium: heavy and golden, slow and ponderous and sweet.  
He is a quick study in other languages as well; perhaps he cannot speak them so easily, but he can read those words and fathom some kind of meaning from them, never minding much about truth or exercises in intent.

Riza, despite the years he has studied her, is foreign to him; a language unto herself, cultivated in the ringing silence after a gunshot. He watches her shoulder her rifle, aim, and fire. Her face never changes and he wonders if there is a secret door that leads into her mind, where she keeps the dictionaries that define her thoughts.


	9. The scent of blood

It's as if Ishbal is an event outside of time, a separate life from the one he lives in now. Perhaps, in a way, this is true.

But it creeps up upon him at the oddest times; he could be buying flowers for Elysia or shopping for groceries and the smells and sounds of the market will churn and blur until he has fallen back through the years. Walking through the restaurant court, he tastes the skim of grease on his lips and remembers the taste of roasted human flesh. Past the butcher shop, past some obscure church reeking animal sacrifice, and he remembers the stench of blood cooking in the hot air around him, that same sort of iron decay.

He is a soldier; he is a scientist. Even as the smell becomes an unwelcome taste in the back of his throat, he stands firm against the rising tide of memory. It is a thing to be endured, although at times Riza comes to him, so shaken as he is, like a stoic's wife. She watched with dark, knowing eyes as he drinks, steadily and with purpose, until he is in an unmoving stupor for the night. Then she moves to drape his overcoat about his shoulders, kiss his forehead, and depart for her own bed.

 

In the morning, they will have their respective aches: those of the heart, the head. Still, they are soldiers; they do not stop for these small, devastating distractions and phantom pains, smells in the head and incessantly twitching fingers.

Such things are to be endured.


	10. Repentance/Confession

It's hard for the two of them to argue normally; because they are so proud, so unyieldingly firm, Roy can never admit to an error and Riza will become a statue, standing before him with a martyr’s silence. Each of them is convinced of their undistorted _rightness_ and unwillingness to acquiesce to the other.

Roy is always especially shocked, perhaps because Riza rarely reveals her opinion; he is used to her solid, dependable, agreeable—or at least non-judgmental—silence, her accommodating presence; her eyes on his back.

He goes home early on days when they argue. He can't think.

It is not until he is in bed, one arm thrown over his face to muffle the words, that he can admit that he is wrong.


	11. Great distance

_Dear Mother,_ Riza writes on the plain, military-issue paper (which is thin and flat like a sheaf of pressed tobacco), _I hope this letter finds you well._

She stops to lick her lips and ponder her next sentence. She makes an odd image, sitting there. For one thing, her hair is newly and boyishly cut and she is dressed in plain, drab clothes. Her formal writing seems, somehow, foreign when paired with her still-androgynous figure; Riza is, after all, still very young.

 _I am learning patience here_ , she finally adds. _It is the epitome of the art of war. I have found someone that I wish to protect._

She stares at what she has written for a moment before shredding the paper and swallowing each dry scrap, small paper angels and ink-sins in her mouth. She puts away her pen and leaves for the shooting range.

 

Several years later, Riza’s mother will receive this in the mail:

     -eleven inches of blonde hair, braided and split at the ends;

     - a regulation pistol and three spare clips of ammunition;

     - an old chemistry text; and

     - forty-eight unfinished letters, all of them addressed nebulously to _home_.

 

Also: a photograph of a dark-haired man with narrow, knowing eyes. Riza herself is in the picture, although her mother only notices her daughter after careful scrutiny. Riza is behind the man and to the left, quiet and stone-faced. On the back, there is a blurred date and a caption: The Flame Alchemist. Riza’s mother has made a career out of avoiding the newspapers, and she does not recognize the man. 

There is no mention of Riza, not on the back of the picture, and no explanation in the box of possessions. Riza’s mother boxes these things up carefully.

She ponders blowing her brains out with Riza’s old pistol, to keep Riza set firmly on her course. She dismisses this idea, however; Riza has no life left to come back to anyway. Any further drama between her daughter and herself is remarkable in its redundancy.

Her mother puts the box away, out of sight, and rewrites the date on the back of the photo before tucking it in between the pages of her dream journal. That night she dreams of death on the battlefield and, instead of recording it faithfully within the book she makes herself a cup of tea and drinks it slowly, staring at the photograph.

 _My daughter is dead_ , she thinks to herself, not daring to say the words out loud. The she washes out her teacup and, as is her habit: says nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We've...learned a lot about Riza's home life since 2004. This is just one of those things.


	12. 94. "If I die"

He is in a morbid state and he looks the part, his hair elegantly mussed and his uniform carefully disheveled. Before him on his desk lay these things: his gloves, a small black book (white pages, unlined, notes and arrays taken in red and black ink), a stack of unsigned papers (approximately two and four-nineteenths of an inch tall) three volumes of what might be poetry, a bottle of alcohol (no glass), and pictures, pictures, pictures. Boxes of them. Many of the photographs are of Roy himself (in them he looks harassed but happy) but they are mostly pictures of Gracia and Elysia, the small family that loved Maes Hughes as entirely as he loved them. (But Roy is not jealous of that, _no no no no_ ; there is nothing special about leaving people behind, about grief. He is lucky, to be as unattached as he is.)

(He is a liar and a fool as well, for thinking that.)

A movement in the doorway; Roy looks up from the pictures to meet Hawkeye's calm gaze. His own eyes are hurt and inexplicably angry. This sort of sorrow is intense, profound, and private; Hawkeye feels like an invader.

 _If you die_ , Roy's eyes seem to say, _you had damn well better make sure that I will not be left like this, weeping after you._

Hawkeye retreats, closing the door of his office without a word; as she does so, she vows that when she does die, there will be nothing left to mourn but blood, bullets, and ash.


	13. 61. Diary/Journal

_I am bothered lately with this strange wanting for you,_ he confides in one of his letters. _I have found images of you in the most abstract of senses—for instance, in a beam of light caught by a chain I see your sternly coiled hair and remember a time when you bound me more greatly to my purpose._ (Here there is a sequence of scribbled out words, too dark to read, and then his flowing script resurfaces.)

 _I think of you often,_ his letter concludes, lamely. _I remain faithfully yours and, as always, I wish you happiness._

(These lines are perhaps not completely true, and in fact read as if he has copied them from some other author's work; without a doubt, however, the recipient of these letters will understand.)

In the end, he does not sign his name and he does not send the letter; instead, he adds it to the teetering stack of notes that he has collected on the balancing of equations and the lesser properties of Hydrogen.

 _We have something more than mere chemistry,_ he scrawls on the back of the envelope, and watches with blank eyes as the entire paper stack falls down about him like a house of cards.


	14. 76. Watching Over You

It is winter and they are still alive.

She loves him without any specific word or action; he knows this, but cannot otherwise understand or comment upon her feelings. He is not certain as to who is being selfish.

 _Will you still follow me?_ He asks.

Her response is another question _: you’re asking me now?_

The two of them are dancing around judgment with the tenuous grace of the dedicated and confused. This is not some sort of fairy tale—and anyway, Roy’s manner is now very seldom regal and Riza has never been a princess of any kind. If anything, she s a talisman, the good luck charm given to an ineffectual hero in an attempt to keep him from falling clumsily upon his own sword.

(This is all figuratively speaking, of course. Right now he knows little else, and Riza is not saying anything.)


	15. 47. In the Dead of Night

Really, she seems even fiercer as she lies sleeping in his arms. There is a hopeless quality to her body, the curious slanting of her twitching fingers and the sudden deepening of her breath as Roy shifts to lie more comfortably alongside her.

Her hair is cast over her face and Roy moves to brush it away from her frail eyelashes, lest it wake her.

The graceful slouch of her spine as she moves in her sleep is the only vulnerable and human characteristic that he can identify.

Right now it is quiet and her sleep is unnatural, focused; in the morning, no trace will remain of her wild presence.


	16. 8. Store-lined Streets

She is as particular about groceries as she is about most things; butchers view her with a sort of gruff respect, wiping their large hands on stained aprons before attending to her order.

Likewise, the merest sighting of her on the streets leads the greengrocers to bring out their best and to sweep around the large vegetable crates at the front of the store.

She is precise, uses exact change, and she never wastes anyone’s time. If half of the proprietors are in love with her she pays them no mind, gathering her bags and nodding farewell before she walks home alone to her empty apartment.


	17. 59. Gift

The summer was inexplicably hot and dry and he could feel the weight of it creeping upon him. The few breezes that the day provided served only to emphasize the oppressive heat and as a result of it there was little work to be done. Instead, the various and sundry members of his command dispersed themselves throughout the compound. Riza alone was still inside the office, no doubt filing paperwork and preparing another monolith of documents for him to sign.

Roy dismissed the others for the day before he reentered the office; once there he sat half-heartedly at his desk, occasionally attending to the papers that Riza placed before him. More often though, he watched her with open fascination, the determined curvature of her face.


	18. 30. Conversation

If he were feeling exceptionally childish and good-natured, he would creep up behind her and cover her eyes with his elegantly gloved hands. Riza would sigh and push him away and go about her business as usual.

Once, his hands were bare; his skin pressed warmly against her eye sockets. "You can't see me," he told her, the tone of his voice anything but cheerful. He sounded like a raw wound.

Riza reached up and placed her hands over his. Beneath their joined hands, her closed eyes burned with something fierce and hopeless that she did not wish to put a name to.

"I always know where you are," she said.

He moved his hands. His face seemed as dark and unreadable as the world outside the office window—it was long past late, and the sky was heavy with rain-pregnant clouds.

Riza handed him a file. "Please sign these, sir," she told him. He laughed, weakly, and although the room lightened, the shadows still lined the creases of his face and the depth of his eyes. Riza didn't think that that sort of darkness—pervasive and unfading, like a deep stain—would ever leave him.

 


	19. 32. Shirt

He once bought a silk undershirt and gave it to her as a gift. He liked to image the feel of it, smooth over her skin.

She slept in it. Once, lurking about her room as she prepared herself for a military dress function (she served a threefold purpose at these events: body guard, chauffeur, and dance partner), he found it shoved beneath one of the pillows on her bed, made hollow with the long impression of her body. He lifted it to his face, imagined the putting on and taking off of such a garment. It smelled, very faintly, of sweat and smoke.


	20. 27. Dependency

Really, without him she is nothing. This knowledge is like a deep throbbing in her mind, a malignant tumor—or perhaps more subtle, a form of arrhythmia, the fluttered and off-kilter beatings of her heart. Four chambers dependent upon a solitary thing, breathing equals oxygen equals existence, please god.

(This is nothing but a bizarre, desperate imagining, and she wonders if she is at all essential to him—this man who is her whole world, who allows her into that gregarious space around him. Herself, a timid and frightened moon floating uncertainly around him, the greater, essential gravitational force.)


	21. 12. Proof

The most significant property of the equation of their lives together is the word “if.” Still, added together, there is something that it is lacking utterly in one major component.

There is a heart to their relationship, but whether or not there is a body in which to house it remains to be seen.


End file.
